Apple's OS X Yosemite Beta Drops Thursday. Here's How to Get It

Developers have been toying with the beta of OS X Yosemite since Apple announced the operating system at WWDC in June. Unfortunately for the rest of us, we have to wait (im)patiently until Yosemite launches officially this fall. Unless you signed up for Apple’s public OS X Yosemite beta program, in which case tomorrow is your lucky day.

OS X users who sign up for this program, which was also announced at WWDC, get access to the beta early without needing a developer account. And beta access will ship Thursday, July 24th.

Here’s how it works. If you signed up with your Apple ID on the beta program website (it’s still not too late to do so), tomorrow you will get an email with a link and activation code to download the latest Yosemite build. While developers get updates to their beta versions every two weeks or so, members of this public beta will only get a handful of updates until Yosemite launches in the fall, and users’ versions will be brought up to speed with the final release version by that point. In other words, you won’t have to wipe your system and re-install the final release when it’s available—you’ll already have it.